You Can't Go Back Again
by Nubian Queen
Summary: In S3, E6, Beautiful Mistake, after Klaus and Aurora are...intimate, we see Klaus sitting on the edge of the bed, musing. What was it he was thinking? Let's have a look...


After the moment in The Originals S3, E7 when Klaus and Aurora are intimate, Klaus sits on the bed, looking like remorse is hitting hard. What were his thoughts at that moment?

Let's take a look.

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There is a saying, _You can't go back again._

Being what I am, and how long I have lived, I thought I had come to understand the many nuances of this statement.

However, even creatures such as myself can forget. Time has a way of doing that...for humans especially but for us sometimes too. A way of taking harsh edges and smoothing them, taking painful memories and soothing them, until all that is seen is the mellow, shimmering beauty of what once was. Minus all the harshness, pain and drama that accompanied it.

For vampires however, it is slightly different.

We can chose to dim a memory, block certain painful ones, or even, turn off our care of them entirely.

But we cannot forget entirely.

Ofttimes this keeps us from repeating mistakes and can be a boon. More often however, it is a torment, especially when one lives as long as we can.

As I sit here, contemplating what I have done, I understand clearer than ever that saying and the ironic reality of my lack of forgetfulness.

_Aurora._

How often I had thought of her.

And how often those thoughts had tormented me like the stab of a thousand white oak stakes.

_How I had loved her!_ And I had believed, once, that she had loved me just as devotedly.

When she spoke those hateful words to me that night so long ago, something broke inside me, so painfully and so completely that I closed myself to feeling such agonizing pain ever again...even from my family.

_Until Caroline._

Her light broke thru to me like nothing else had in a thousand years. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I wanted something, _someone_, in ways I could barely remember.

While I have had many women over the centuries, none of them spoke to my soul in the manner that those two singular women did. And while a small, select few became something like friends, none were ones I gave a piece of myself to, besides the obvious.

Aurora, like her name, had been like the breaking of dawn for me. Like the first ray of light in a life that had, up until then, been quite bleak.

_But Caroline..._

She shone like the midday sun.

I didn't lie when I told Aurora that I had not forgotten her, or the love we had shared. And when she came to me, kissed me, I fell to the power of that remembered love with hardly any hesitation at all. I wanted to feel the power of it again.

Only...

it was not there. It was like making love to a ghost, and the harder I tried, the more the feeling slipped through my fingers.

I closed my eyes for an instant as she touched me and it was not her hand I felt, her sigh I heard, but that of another.

It was not the soft bedding and silken sheets that we had fell upon I felt beneath us, not the muggy heat of a New Orleans day that informed my senses, but a cool breeze and the scent of pine, the silken feel of sunkissed, golden tresses and the rough feel of grass and bark and a pile of clothing haphazardly thrown down to serve as a barrier betwixt skin and earth.

And it was not Aurora's name that my soul cried when I found my pleasure.

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As I sit here at this moment looking at her sleeping face, I can feel the tears that I pushed so ruthlessly away earlier cresting now.

And I fully understand, in a much deeper way, that sometimes, once a time has passed, once certain barriers are breached, you truly cannot go back again.

It took seeing and feeling and touching my beloved ghost, holding her in my arms and seeking to find the treasure I had once had, for me to understand that.

The fear that wells in my heart now steals what breath I have.

I harden myself against it. Against the thought of losing what I have found with my golden girl, my lovely Caroline.

I know she is not ready for forever, she is much to young, even though her age is equal to that of the beauty before me when she was turned. But, as cliche as it is, times _were_ different then. Age, adulthood, came much swifter and earlier then than in these softer times.

So I will wait for her. I know she will come when she is ready.

It was her parting words to me after all, as she drifted to sleep in my arms in our woodland embrasure.

_Not now, but someday, we will have forever._

That is something I know now with even more certainty, that I will move heaven and earth to achieve. I will not lose love to time and circumstance again.

I will not lose Caroline.

I will go back again for her no matter how long it takes.


End file.
